Contents of spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/papers/kloss.polytheism

Pierre Klossowski: Nietzsche, polytheism and parody (extract) [nb. The whole article was really too much to tackle, and it is only towards the end that he specifically addresses _polytheism_, so here is the last section. Without wanting to shift blame for any awkwardness in this rough translation, Klossowski, in his combination of a sort of archaic style plus something like speaking in tongues, is a "minor" writer in the best sense, and I have made only very minor adjustments to his punctuation, which, given that his sentences can run for pages, makes him as hard to read as he is.] p. 218 "Is existence still capable of a God", asks Heidegger. And this question is posed as much in the biographical context of he who formulates it for the first time as a piece of news: _God is dead_, as it is posed in the context of the events and thought of the contemporary period. The morning after his breakdown [_effondrement_], at Turin, Nietzsche wakes up with the feeling of being at once Dionysus and the Crucified, and he signs with one or the other divine name the diverse letters he sends to Strindberg, Burckhardt and other personalities. Until that moment, there had never been any question that Dionysus and the Crucified were opposed: "Have I been understood? Dionysus against the Crucified". And now that the professor Nietzsche has gone under, or rather now that he has finally abolished all limits between the inside and the outside, he declares that _two gods_ cohabit in him. Let us put aside any pathological consideration and retain this declaration as a valid judgement concerning his apprehension of existence. The substitution of divine names for that of Nietzsche touches immediately on the problem of personal identity in relation to _a single God_, who is truth, and on the existence of several gods in so far as they are an explication of being on the one hand, and as an expression of plurality in a single individual, in each and in all, on the other hand. He thus maintains in himself the image of Christ or rather, as he says, the Crucified, a supreme symbol which dwells in him as indispensably opposed to Dionysus, the two names of Christ and Dionysus constituting an equilibrium through their antagonism. We see that we return to the problem of the authentic that is incommunicable, and it is equally in this respect that Karl Löwith, in his major work on the eternal return, poses the question of credibility on the subject of Nietzsche's doctrine: if he is not Dionysus, the whole edifice falls into ruin. But I claim that this is a case of not seeing in what sense the simulacrum can or cannot account for the authentic. When Nietzsche announces that _God is dead_, this amounts to saying that Nietzsche must necessarily lose his own identity. For what is presented here as ontological catastrophe precisely responds to the reabsorption of the true and apparent world by the fable: at the heart of the fable there is a plurality of norms or rather there is no norm properly speaking in the sense of this word, because the very principle of responsible identity is properly unknown there in so far as existence is not explicated or revealed in the physiognomy of a unique God who, _qua_ judge of a responsible self, tears the individual from a potential plurality. _God is dead_ does not signify that divinity ceases as an explication of existence, but rather that the absolute guarantee of the identity of the responsible self disappears at the horizon of Nietzsche's consciousness which, in turn, merges with this disappearance. If the notion of identity is obliterated, nothing remains first of all but the fortuitous which comes to consciousness. Until then, it recognised the fortuitous by virtue of its apparent necessary identity, according to which it judges whether all things around it are necessary or fortuitous. But once the fortuitous is revealed to it as the necessary effect of a universal law, the wheel of fortune, it can come to consider itself as fortuitous. It remains only for it to declare that its very identity is a fortuitous case arbitrarily maintained as necessary, even if it means taking itself for this universal wheel of fortune, even if it means embracing ,if possible, the totality of cases, the fortuitous itself in its necessary totality. What subsists is thus being, the verb being which is never applied to being itself but to the fortuitous. Thus, in Nietzsche's declaration: "I am Chambige, I am Badinguet, I am Prado - at bottom all the names in history are me", we see this consciousness enumerate, like so many randomly drawn lots, different possibilities of being which, all, would be being, using this momentary success named Nietzsche, but who, _qua_ success, comes to give himself up for a more generous demonstration of being: "I would in the end much more willingly be professor at Bâle than God, but I have not dared to push my personal egoism far enough in order to abandon because of it the creation of the worldŠ One must make sacrifices wherever and however one lives." Existence as the eternal return of all things is produced in physiognomies as as many multiple gods as it has possible explications in men's souls. If the will adheres to this perpetual movement of the universe, it is first of all the circle of gods that it contemplates, as it is said in _Zarathustra_: "The universe being only an eternal-fleeing-from-itself, and an eternal finding-itself-again of multiple gods, a happy-self-contradiction, a happy-self-reconciliation, belonging-again of multiple gods." No doubt the Nietzschean version of polytheism is necessarily as far away from devotion in antiquity as his own notion of the divine instinct that generates several gods is from the Christian notion of divinity. But what this "version" bears witness to is the refusal to install himself in an atheist morality which, for Nietzsche, was no less unlivable [_irrespirable_ - unbreathable] than monotheistic morality, and he could not avoid seeing in the humanitarian and atheist morality the continuation of what he felt as the tyranny of a unique truth, whatever its denomination, and it made little difference whether it appeared as categorical imperative or under the physiognomy of an exclusive personal God. And, effectively, the disbelief with regard to a unique and normative God, of a God who is the Truth, no less affirms itself as an _impiety of properly divine inspiration_ and forbids itself any withdrawal of reason into strictly human limits. Nietzschean impiety not only discredits reasonable man, but moreover makes itself complicit with all the phantasms, as reflections in the soul of all that man had to necessarily expel in order to arrive at a rational definition of his nature; not that this impiety aspires to a pure and simple unleashing of blind forces as it is generally the custom to say on the subject of Nietzsche, when he has nothing in common with a vitalism that would make a _tabula rasa_ of all the elaborated forms of culture; Nietzsche is the antipodes of all naturalism; and Nietzsche's impiety declares itself to be a tributary of this culture; this is why one finds in Zarathustra's incantation something like an appeal to an insurrection of images, of those images which, in its phantasms, the human soul, in contact with the forces of obscurity within itself, is capable of forming; phantasms which bear witness to the soul's ever inexhaustible aptitude for metamorphosis, of a universal unsated need for investment where the diverse extra-human forms of existence propose themselves to the soul as so many possibilities of being: rock , plant, animal, star, but in so far as they would always be possibilities of the very life of the soul; this aptitude for metamorphosis which, under the regime of the exclusive normative principle, constitutes the major temptation against which man has had to struggle for millennia in order to define himself; not that, in this struggle for self-definition, this aptitude for metamorphosis has not itself contributed to the process of elimination which was supposed to result in man: the proof of this is precisely the delimitation of the divine and the human and the admirable compensation by virtue of which, to the extent that man renounces his bestiality, his vegetability, his minerality, to the extent also that he hierarchises his desires and passions according to always variable criteria, an analogous hierarchy was revealed to him in supra- or infra-mundane regions; the universe was populated with so many divinities, but diverse divinities of either sex (1), hence divinities capable of pursuing each other, fleeing each other, uniting with each other; such it was that there was for an instant this stunning equilibrium of the world blossomed into myth where thanks to the simulacra of multiple gods of various kinds and sex1, neither "consciousness", nor "unconsciousness", neither "outside", nor "interior", neither "obscure forces", nor "phantasms" preoccupied the spirit, once the entirety of the soul learnt to situate images in space, indistinct from the soul. From the perspective, moral monotheism, if it has achieved the self-conquest of man and enslaved nature to man in allowing the anthropological phenomenon of science, would no less have provoked, according to Nietzsche, the deep disequilibrium resulting in nihilist disarray, at the end of two millennia; whence also this alienation of the universe by man that Nietzsche apprehended in the exploration of the universe by science and, by virtue of this fact, the very loss of what this nostalgia of the soul, adept at metamorphosis, expresses: the fundamental _eros_ which makes man, Nietzsche says, the _animal which venerates_. What appears then is that the event of the "death of God" attains the eros of the soul, and thus the instinct of adoration, at its root, this _instinct which generates gods_ which, in Nietzsche, is at once _creative will_ and _will to eternalisation_. The "death of God" signifies from this perspective that a rupture is produced in eros and that it is split, from this point, into two contrary tendencies: the _will to create oneself_ which never proceeds without destruction, and the _will to adore_ which never proceeds without the will to eternalisation; and in so far as the _will to power_ is just another term for this group of tendencies, and constitutes the universal aptitude for metamorphosis, it finds something like a compensation, like a cure in its identification with _Dionysus_, in the sense that, In Nietzsche, this ancient god of polytheism represents and reunites in himself all the dead and resuscitated gods. Zarathustra himself takes account of this dissociation of the two wills, that of creating and that of adoring - when he requires the creation of new values; thus of new truths which man would never be able to believe nor obey in so far as they would be marked with the seal of distress and destruction. Which excludes the possibility that this will to create new values could ever satisfy the need to adore, this need being implicit in the will to self-eternalisation. If man is an animal who venerates, he only knows to venerate what comes to him through the necessity of being - by virtue of which he cannot but will to be. And thus he could neither obey nor believe in values that he deliberately creates, unless it is a matter of the very simulacra of his need for eternity. Whence in Zarathustra this alternation of the _will to create_ in the absence of the gods, and the very contemplation of the _dance of the gods_ which explicates the universe. It is when he announces that _all the gods are dead_ that Zarathustra demands that from this point the _overman live_, that is, the humanity which would know how to overcome itself. How does it overcome itself? In desiring [_revoulant_] that all things that were already reproduce themselves, and this as its proper/own activity: this action is defined as will to creation and Zarathustra declares that _if there were gods, what would there be to create?_ But what is it that brings man to create if not precisely the law of the eternal return to which he decides to adhere? What does he adhere to if it is not precisely a life that he has _forgotten_, but that the revelation of the eternal return as law incites him to want again? And what does he want again if it is not precisely what just now he did not think of wanting: is this saying that the absence of gods incites him to create new gods? Or rather does he want to prevent the return of the ages when he adored the gods? By re-willing the gods, now that he wants the man's passage to a superior life? But how else, given this, would this life be superior, if not by tending towards what it was already? How, in other words, if not by tending towards this state in which it thought nothing of creating, but rather of adoring the gods? And thus it appears that the doctrine of the eternal return is once again conceived as a _simulacrum of a doctrine_ whose very parodic character accounts for _hilarity_ as a self-sufficient attribute of existence when the laughter bursts at the foundation of truth in its entirety, whether it is that the truth explodes in the laughter of the gods, or whether the gods themselves die of mad laughter: "When a god wanted to be the only God, all the other gods were gripped by mad laughter to the point of _dying_ of laughter. For what is the divine if not the fact that there be several gods and not God alone?" Laughter is here the supreme image, the supreme manifestation of the divine reabsorbing the articulated gods [_les dieux prononces_], and articulating the gods through a new burst of laughter; for if the gods die from this laughter, it is also _from this laughter which bursts forth from the ground of all truth_ that the gods are reborn. One must follow Zarathustra to the end of his adventure to see the refutation of the need to create in relation to and against necessity, as a _denunciation_ of this _solidarity_ between the _three_ forces of _eternalisation_, _adoration_ and _creation_, these three cardinal virtues in Nietzsche, where one sees that the death of God and the distress of the fundamental eros, the distress of the need to adore are identical; a distress that the need to create holds up to ridicule as its own failure. For if it is the failure of a single instinct, the mockery which compensates for it is no less inscribed in the necessity of the eternal return: Zarathustra, once he has willed the eternal return of all things, has in advance chosen to see his own doctrine ridiculed, as if _laughter, this infallible murderer_, was not also the best inspiration, as well as the best despiser of this same doctrine; _thus the eternal return of all things wills also the return of the gods_. What other sense, if not this one, can we attribute to the extraordinary parody of the Last Supper where God's murderer is also the one who offers the chalice to the donkey - sacrilegious figure of the Christian God from the time of the pagan reaction, but more specifically the sacred animal of the ancient mysteries, the _golden_ donkey of the Isiac [_isiaque_ - ? to do with Isis?] initiation, an animal dignified by his indefatigable _Ia_(2) - its indefatigable _yes_ given to the return of all things - worthy of representing divine forbearance, worthy also thus of incarnating an ancient divinity, Dionysus, the god of the vine, resuscitated in the general drunkenness. And, effectively, as the Traveller declares to Zarathustra: _death, with the gods, is never anything but a prejudice_. EndNotes: (1) What we are catching a glimpse of here is not a return to a demonology: so many _obscure forces_, so many _demons_; but a _theogony_: so many psychic dispositions, so many divinities, so many antagonistic or conciliatory dispositions, so many divinities susceptible of fighting and uniting with each other. The demonology of neo-Platonic origin is already on the path towards psychology, a sort of figurative psychology, on the other hand, pantheology presupposes a _notion of space_ where the interior life of the soul and the life of the cosmos form but a single space in which the event, for us "psychological", is situated as a spatial fact. This is why the pantheology of the _myth_ with its divine _genealogies_, with the _amourous adventures_ of the gods and goddesses, creates an equilibrium between man and his own forces: for they find their physiognomy thus in the eternal figure of the gods: the practical consequences of such an equilibrium are at the other end from those which flow from a purely psychological conception: consciousness and will and thus the morality of behaviour. There reigns in _theogony_ only an exchange, a commerce between the favour and disfavour of being: the physiognomy of such or such a god attracts or repels the physiognomy of such or such a goddess, according to the rule of the law of pursuit, of erotic attraction; however, _we do not find here_ what we are accustomed to call a _pure transposition _ of human experience, but a process which belongs to the very manifestations of being: the commerce of the sexes only being under the auspices of the divinities an explication of being in its modes of _appearing_ and _disappearing_, while this same exchange is only in its human form an experience of living and dying. What is named as such in us is nothing but a necessary participation in the explications of being in divine physiognomies. (2) Ia: _ita est!_ 1What we are catching a glimpse of here is not a return to a demonology: so many obscure forces, so many demons, but a theogony: so many psychic dispositions, so many divinities, so many antagonistic or conciliatory dispositions, so many divinities susceptible of fighting and uniting with each other. The demonology of neo-Platonic origin is already on the path towards psychology, a sort of figurative psychology, on the other hand, pantheology presupposes a notion of space where the interior life of the soul and the life of the cosmos form but a single space in which the event, for us "psychological", is situated as a spatial fact. This is why the pantheology of the myth with its divine genealogies, with the amourous adventures of the gods and goddesses, creates an equilibrium between man and his own forces: for they find their physiognomy thus in the eternal figure of the gods: the practical consequences of such an equilibrium are at the other end from those which flow from a purely psychological conception: consciousness and will and thus the morality of behaviour. There reigns in theogony only an exchange, a commerce between the favour and disfavour of being: the physiognomy of such or such a god attracts or repels the physiognomy of such or such a goddess, according to the rule of the law of pursuit, of erotic attraction; however, we do not find here what we are accustomed to call a pure transposition of human experience, but a process which belongs to the very manifestations of being: the commerce of the sexes only being under the auspices of the divinities an explication of being in its modes of appearing and disappearing, while this same exchange is only in its human form an experience of living and dying. What is named as such in us is nothing but a necessary participation in the explications of being in divine physiognomies.

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